


Counting

by arifail



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Anxiety-fueled compulsive counting, Codependence to the nth degree, Sleepless nights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 23:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4806410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arifail/pseuds/arifail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even while they're relatively, finally safe from outside danger, beside her Joel is slowly but steadily creeping closer to death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting

#  Counting 

_I count his breaths_

_in hours unslept,  
_

_against hours of him,  
_

_I have left. _  
__

___-Lang Leav___

 _  
_

Tonight, Ellie doesn't sleep.

_Four thousand, five hundred, and fifty-eight. Four thousand, five hundred, and fifty-nine. Four thousand, five hundred, and sixty._

It's an almost unbearably warm summer night in Jackson, and the air is heavy and humid and sticky in Ellie's lungs. The little cabin Tommy had set aside for Joel - that had been gifted to Joel and Ellie - was built to be defensible: a safe haven for a man who'd been watching his back for two long decades. The walls are thick, the windows too high and narrow for even the weak night breeze to get in. The height and angle of them causes the pale light of the swollen moon to cast eerie shadows across the sparse furnishings of the bedroom she shares with Joel.

Joel, sleeping soundly and deeply. The bed is designed for one large man to stretch out comfortably but Joel isn't much for having Ellie out of reach and Ellie isn't much for sleeping away from Joel so they make it work. He's resting on his belly, head turned to face her, only a handful of inches between their bodies; he's close enough to touch. She longs to close that short gap but the air between them might as well be stone for all she can reach through it.

Tonight, Ellie doesn't sleep. She counts.

_Four thousand, five hundred and sixty-three. Four thousand, five hundred and sixty-four._

Beside her, Joel's breath hitches for just a moment as he shifts to the left, towards her, and settles again.

_Four thousand, five hundred, and sixty-five._

That silvery, weak moonlight settles across his broad back and highlights the hills of firm muscles, deepening the darkness of valleys and lines between them. A mottled mess of scars, all shapes and sizes and causes, glow across the expanse like markers on a map Ellie has memorized. Inevitably, inexorably, her gaze is drawn down low, to one particular injury - an angry, crooked line, black in the moonlight and surrounded by the tale-tell blemishes of stitchwork. A stark reminder of how she'd almost lost him, of how very close she'd come to living without Joel. His back swells upward as he inhales, lungs inflating in his chest, pressing down against the mattress, lifting him from the bed. The scar moves with it, proof of life.

_Four thousand, five hundred, and sixty-six._

Joel, still here. Still breathing.

_Four thousand, five hundred, and sixty-seven._

They're safe now. As safe as they can be, at any rate. Their weapons are never far and if Ellie had to defend herself at this exact moment she could use the pistol under her pillow or the blade tucked under the mattress near her shoulder or her butterfly knife, resting on the tiny table wedged between the bed and the wall. Of course, any intruder would have to go through Joel first, who had not-so-subtly insisted on taking the side of the bed nearest the entryway. Even as deeply as he's sleeping right now he'd be awake and armed before the knob finished turning in the door. It's the closest thing to secure she's felt in her life but her heart hammers in her chest with anxiety regardless. Even while they're relatively, finally safe from outside danger, beside her Joel is slowly but steadily creeping closer to death.

_Four thousand, five hundred, and seventy-four._

Ellie isn't sure exactly how old Joel is. Old enough to have had a daughter her age twenty-one long years ago. He'd said he'd had Sarah young but at the very least Joel has to be on the tail end of his forties. How long do people live before their bodies start to give out? Ellie has never known anyone who has lived to die of old age, and she knows now that when the Zones had been constructed there had been limited space - the elderly wouldn't have been the first choice for citizenship. So how long does that leave Joel, who has run and fought and been shot and stabbed and slept on the ground and gone hungry and - really, it's a miracle his body hasn't quit on him yet. She watches his back as he sinks down into the mattress with a near-silent exhale.

_Four thousand, five hundred, and ninety._

Even if he has ten years - fifteen - before he begins to really slow down, what is that in terms of her life? She'll still be a young woman even then, vibrant and healthy as Joel withers and wastes away. How will she be able to watch that, watch him fade? Will she even notice or will he sit down one day and need her help to get back up? Will he fall and shatter old bones that had gone weak and frail while she'd been busy growing? Will she wake up one morning and find herself in a world without Joel? It isn't the first or second or tenth time she's been confronted with his death but every time before, always, she's been able to intercede, to do something to keep him with her. But bottles and bullets and field first aid kits can do nothing to slow the march of time, the long stretch of years that will rob her of him. It's a new fear, sharp and bitter like a threat.

The horror of that knowledge - the helpless realization, the inevitability of Joel's growing old - seizes her suddenly and fiercely and she panics, overwhelmed. Her chest freezes as if it's locked in a razor-edged vice and her lungs flood with acid and her mouth fills with metal that scrapes against her teeth and blisters her tongue and she can't turn her eyes away from Joel in their bed - gray and frail; wet-paper skin and brittle, knobby bones.

He inhales -

Ellie inhales with him -

_Four thousand, six hundred, and twenty-eight._

And he's himself again. Tired and worn but strong and whole and alive. The deep crags under his eyes have filled to shallow, fine lines and his hair is dark and only dusted with silver. His skin is flushed with heat and a fine sheen of sweat glistens over his neck and shoulders in the watery moonlight. Her fingertips feel tight and raw with the need to touch him but she doesn't. She can't.

Ellie is a product of the world she was born into, has grown up in unpredictability and fear and she's learned to cope: with sarcasm and humor and stolen moments. She's learned to grab on to any certainty she can find and ground herself.

She's certain that she is -

_Four thousand, six hundred, and sixty-two._

\- breaths closer to losing Joel than she'd been when he'd dropped off to sleep beside her. She wants to go back, to count them all over again. She wants to force them back into him, to seal her mouth over his and breathe each and every one back into his lungs. She exhales -

_Four thousand, six hundred, and sixty-three._

\- and her heart rate slowly eases back into something reasonable, panic subsiding into anxiety again.

Tonight, Ellie doesn't sleep. Instead she matches her breathing to Joel's - depth and rate and timing. She imagines they're breathing the same air, filling their lungs with each other, molding and melding until they're one person. She imagines him as young as she is. She imagines she's as old as him.

Contrary to the jokes she sometimes makes, Joel doesn't snore. In sleep, he's near silent except for the quiet _shhh_ of moving air and the low, incoherent mumbling as he relives the trials of his life in his dreams. Occasionally dreams spiral down into nightmares and breaths harshen into gasps and murmurs sharpen into words. In these moments, Ellie speaks to him in her lowest, calmest voice. _"We're alright, Joel. We're safe."_ Always he wakens, sometimes fully but more often he regains only enough awareness to confirm that she's beside him, that her words are truth, and then he's gone again. It's happened twice so far tonight, and her heart aches for the nights that she isn't awake, haunted by her demons and listening for his. On those nights the silence is shattered by hoarse cries or tears or her screams. On those nights, neither of them sleeps. But for tonight, it's just her keeping hushed vigil.

Tonight, Ellie doesn't sleep.

_Four thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-seven. Four thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-eight. Four thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-nine. Four thousand, seven hundred, and -_

Silence. One beat, two, three; just when Ellie's nerves are about to snap with tension and horror and _'Is he already lost?'_ , Joel exhales.

_Four thousand, seven hundred, and thirty._

"Ellie." His voice, rough and heavy and sudden as a rock fall, startles her and she can tell he's more asleep than awake when he lifts himself to his side to face her, sluggishly kicking off the sheets tangled around his legs and scrubbing a hand over his sweaty forehead. The moonlight throws his rugged features into sharp, detailed relief and makes his eyes almost luminous and he squints a little bit into the sudden brightness of it. "It's late," he rumbles. "What are you still doin' up?" The skin around his lips tightens for just a moment in the silence that follows that question but his mouth quickly parts around a low sigh and the tension is gone. Mostly gone. "Are you alright?"

She nods, but she's too busy adding that slow exhale to her tally to speak.

_Four thousand, seven hundred, and thirty-one._

The silence stretches for several minutes and she can feel him watching her but she can't stop counting his breaths and she can't reach through the stone-air between them to touch him and she feels stuck and overwrought and wound too tightly.

_Four thousand, eight hundred, and two. Four thousand, eight hundred, and three._

"Not a nightmare," Joel says in that landslide voice, and then he drops onto his back, finally looking away from her. He sighs again, exhausted now because he knows she's fighting demons even if he isn't sure which ones. Exhausted because her pain is his pain and he feels her burdens with the same crushing force that she does.

_Four thousand, eight hundred, and four._

"C'mere," he rumbles and he lifts his arm from his side and just like that the barrier that had kept her from him for long hours is gone. She bolts so eagerly across those few inches that she loses her balance and careens into him and he grunts on impact but doesn't chastise her. She quickly settles on her side, stretching out one leg to drape over his and laying her head on the hard swell of his shoulder. She fits snugly against him, the pit of his arm sweltering-hot against her shoulder and the fronts of his thighs sweaty against her own from being pressed for hours into the bedding. The temperature in the room seems to skyrocket almost immediately, the air so saturated with moisture she can feel it, dewy on her skin and boiling in her lungs. It's blistering-hot and sticky and a little uncomfortable - her neck is craned to fit her head on his shoulder and her own arm is trapped beneath her and she's more accustomed to star-fish sleeping than locking her body to his like a puzzle piece - but she lets her hand rest on his bare chest and for the first time all night the tension in her body unwinds, dissipates.

He doesn't ask her what's troubling her, doesn't try to talk to her. He just offers her himself, this closeness: solid and comforting and exactly what she needs.

They exhale together.

_Four thousand, eight hundred, and five._

Ellie closes her eyes; finally, finally. Beneath her hand Joel's chest swells with life and air and his heart _thu-thumps_ and his sweat feels tacky on her skin and the coarse hair curling there sends little prickles of sensation across her palm with each movement and he's so vital and so real right now and the ache in her chest eases; finally, finally.

_Four thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-one._

Ellie can't stop time. Joel is still old, still getting older. She's still - 

_Four thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-two._

\- breaths closer to losing him than she had been when she'd started counting tonight, but she still has millions of breaths left with him and she will cherish all of them, will fight to make sure he can take each and every one. There will be more sleepless nights, more hours of terrible understanding where Joel's ever-present mortality will threaten to overwhelm her. Eventually there will be new changes, new benchmarks to terrify her as time marches onward. But tonight she relaxes into his presence and the comfort he provides. Tonight she revels in the fact that he's alive and with her, that they'll have years and years together. It's still a new idea, sweet like a promise.

Tonight, Ellie sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem at the beginning is 'Over My Head' by the lovely Lang Leav, from her book _Lullabies._
> 
> Titles are meant to be half-assed. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.


End file.
